Dense populations, studied in some mammals, leads toward reduced reproduction through several
types of epigenetic change, of which only choice to reproduce or not is relevant here.
One
type of epigenetic change to the genome occurs when small chemical groups glom on to the ladder structure of DNA.
Compared with people who had never smoked, these individuals had fewer chemical tags known as methyl groups — a common
type of epigenetic change — on 20 different regions of their DNA.
One
type of epigenetic change is methylation, where a methyl group is added to or removed from a base in the DNA molecule without affecting the original DNA sequence.
Not exact matches
It also sought to match
epigenetic changes and genetic differences to the physical characteristics
of each cell
type and use this knowledge to understand how these can lead to blood disorders, cancer and other complex diseases.
The Human Genome Project, which sequenced the 3 billion pairs
of nucleotide bases in human DNA, was a piece
of cake in comparison:
Epigenetic markers and patterns are different in every tissue
type in the human body and also
change over time.
The project's goals were to explore and describe the range
of epigenetic changes that take place in bone marrow as stem cells develop into different
types of mature blood cell.
The new research adds to the growing body
of evidence
of epigenetic changes in diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis,
type 2 diabetes, and obesity.
«We believe that the discovered
epigenetic changes, depending on the
type of fat they ate, could contribute to the difference in fat storage, in which saturated fat has a more negative impact,» says Charlotte Ling.
«The study confirms our previous assumptions that
epigenetic changes may contribute to the development
of type 2 diabetes» says Charlotte Ling.
Methylation is one
type of so - called
epigenetic changes, alterations in genes during the lifetime that affect their expression.
Recent theorizing within this tradition suggests that these shifts may be manifested in
changes in the relative frequency
of particular cell
types in blood (Irwin and Cole, 2011) as well as in the
epigenetic programming and gene expression
of such cells (Miller et al., 2011a).